Elora Wilde's Arc

Chapter 4 of 9

The butterflies thinned as Elora and Rowan walked back toward the cottage, but the white rabbit stayed. It sat on the moss ahead, ears tall, eyes lit green as wet leaves. When Elora took a step toward home, it hopped the other way. When she stopped, it stopped. Rowan watched it, then watched her. "It wants us to follow," he said. She thought of the fox waiting on her counter, the paste she still had to make. But she had learned tonight what came of ignoring these small guides. She shifted the satchel of cut herbs to her hip and went after the rabbit. It led them east through the flowered clearing and out the far side, down a slope she had never crossed. The trees changed. Older trunks, wider apart. After an hour the wind carried woodsmoke and voices, and then lantern light showed between the branches. Elora crouched. It was not a trappers' camp. It was a market. Painted stalls under striped cloth, strings of glass beads, baskets of fruit she did not know the names of. Fae folk moved between the tables, small and tall, some with wings folded tight against their backs. "I didn't know this was here," Elora whispered. Rowan's mouth tightened. "It moves," he said. "You find it when it wants you to." The rabbit slipped between two stalls and stopped at a low table set apart from the food and cloth. An old woman sat behind it, sorting bones and stones and stacks of paper. On the table lay a book. Its cover was dark leather, cracked, and cut with symbols Elora had never seen on any plant guide her grandmother had owned. Elora reached for it. The old woman did not look up. She only nodded once. Elora opened the book to the middle. The pages were yellow and stained, the writing half in a script she could not read and half in plain words between. Invocation of the ancient forest spirits. Call to the guardians of the deep woods. Her breath caught. She turned another page and found a drawing of a bear traced through with glowing marks, and under it a rite for calling a warden of the trees to shield a place from harm. "This is what stopped me," she said. Rowan leaned in. "The butterfly?" "The forest," she said. "It has hands. It has names. It didn't want me to kill that man because it wanted me to find this." She read further. The rites asked for offerings of blood and breath and a place kept clean of killing. In return, spirits would come. They would guard what she guarded. The old woman spoke then, without looking up. "Three silver, or a fair trade." Elora had no silver. Rowan set a small carved bird on the table, wood still green at the cut. The woman turned it in her fingers, sniffed it, and slid the book toward Elora. Elora held the book against her chest as they climbed back up the slope. She knew now why the arrow had been stopped. She knew what she had to learn. The hunters were still in her woods, and the fox still needed its paste by morning, but for the first time she saw a way to drive them out that did not end with her alone against them all.